Propagation

It’s all about the survival of the species.  Alex and I, in our travels throughout the immediate area, chanced upon a gray, papier-mâché like formation a bit larger than a softball, but more football shaped.  Alex asked me if I knew what that thing was?  When I answered that it was a paper wasp’s nest, he wanted to know what that was all about.

I answered something to the effect that the residents were a wasp, more or less like a hornet.  They built and used these structures as a home.  Then I began to wonder more about them.  As this was their home, were they in it?  The nest seemed partially disintegrated.  If they were in it, could they survive the extreme cold of our area?  Did they store winter food like honey bees?  If they were not in the nest, then where were they?  Did they migrate like birds?

In fact, about twenty to thirty mature wasps live in a nest.  They are divided as workers, queens, and males.  The nest contains many cells in which a queen deposits a single fertilized egg in each.  The sterile workers assist in the building of the nest, as well as the care and feeding of the grub-like larvae that are hatched.  The young pass through several stages before becoming an adult.

As fall approaches the queens stop laying eggs, and the colony goes into decline.  Mated offspring of the queen seek shelter elsewhere, often hibernating beneath siding on houses or other sheltered areas, to await the following spring when they go off to build their own nests.

When you get down to the nitty-gritty all they do is continue their species.  Following that line of thought, that’s also all that humans do.  The rest is just details.